Day Zero

Viv and I know that we don’t have much time left before our baby arrives. There is only two and a half weeks to go til the estimated due date.

As we wake up, Viv tells me she’s feeling a lot of downward pressure in her uterus and cramping like she’s on a period. I think,”5-1-1 rule: if contractions are 5 minutes apart start to start, 1 minute in length, repeating for 1 hour, you need to call the doctor. The cramping doesn’t go away for Viv, so this is not a contraction and I don’t need to call the doctor.” The baby’s been kicking her ribs and pushing on her bladder for weeks, so Viv’s discomfort level has definitely been increasing. We decide to go about getting ready for the day ahead.

Just yesterday, we finished getting everything ready in preparation for our baby. We checked off the last two items on our list, getting our car seats inspected by the CHP and taking an infant care class.

We’ve been counting down the days til delivery and following our baby’s expected development through babycenter.com and baby gaga.com. Viv reached full term half a week ago.

Wanting to make the most of our time before the baby arrives, we sit together at the end of our bed and put together an agenda for the day. Our plan is to attend Henry’s twins’ 1st birthday, visit a few open houses on the market, take maternity pics, and then head over to my mom’s for an early Chinese New Year dinner.

A few minutes after completing the list, Viv calls me into the bathroom in a worried voice. There’s blood in her pad. We had just read about bloody show on babycenter last night, so hopefully that’s what this is.

I call our doctor’s office and the answering service operator picks up the phone. I explain the situation and the operator puts me on hold.  I wait a few seconds before the familiar voice of the doctor’s assistant answers on the other end. She tells me that Dr. H just returned from a mission in the Philippines in the middle of the night and she’s going to try her best to reach him. I feel a bit of a letdown as both Viv and I like Dr. H and expected he would be the one delivering our baby. He’s the only one that gets the father involved in the delivery and I was really looking forward to that. His assistant tells me we should head to the hospital to get checked out.

Ditch the agenda, I think our baby is coming early… I try to temper my excitement as we aren’t sure whether Viv is really in labor yet.

We take quick showers before grabbing our bags and heading to the hospital. We make a pitstop at a Chinese bakery to pick up some bbq pork buns and egg tarts since we have a feeling it’s going to be a long day ahead of us at the hospital.

Luckily, we preregistered at the hospital yesterday. We skip the registration desk and make a beeline to the hospitals’ baby center as soon as we arrive. We are seen by a nurse who looks a bit like one of those Viking opera singers in the cartoons. She puts an elastic band around Viv’s belly to hold two circular sensors shaped like restaurant pagers. The sensors are used to monitor contractions. The contractions are displayed on a monitor as a waveform. When the wave starts to ascend, it’s an indication that a contraction is beginning. The wave begins to climb up on the monitor. Viv’s belly tightens like  its’ holding a crunch in mid-air. She’s definitely having contractions. The nurse puts on a pair of gloves and puts her beefy fingers together to measure how dilated Viv is. She measures 2.5cm dilated.The baby is really on its’ way! A second nurse walks in and lets us know that she was able to reach Dr H. He’ll be coming to deliver our baby. What a relief.

The hospital policy is that a patient needs to be 4.5cm dilated or they send us back home to wait. Patients get to stay two nights in the hospital after the baby is born, so if your baby is born before midnight, that counts as the first night.

To help push the labor along, the nurse recommends that we walk around to put more downward pressure on the baby. We take a stroll around the hospital and get familiar with the layout of the baby center. They have “nourishment” rooms which are like little kitchenettes stocked with some snacks for the patients. There’s jello, apple sauce, fruit juices, milk, mac and cheese, and marie calendar chicken pot pies. Chicken pot pies! Woohoo! Pot pie, I’ll be back for you later! We grab two jello cups and head out to the patio to enjoy some afternoon sun. It’s a surprisingly warm day for late January. We eat our bbq pork buns and jello and decide to take a few pics of Viv before she’s set to deliver.

After about an hour, we head back down to our room. Another nurse enters and confirms Viv is now dilated to 4.5cm. That’s  a lot of progress since the last measurement. We are told that the previous nurses’ beefy fingers might have played a factor in the previous numbers being a little low. The amount of dilation is estimated by how far two fingers can spread apart in the cervix. Regardless, it’s time to move into the delivery room. Wow. Viv is really going into labor.

I call our parents to break the news. Their voices getting louder and faster with excitement. I ask my dad if he has thought of a Chinese name yet. My dad is responsible for thinking of a Chinese name for our baby. He is really good at coming up with names deep in meaning. He wasn’t expecting the baby to come this early though, so he needs to rethink the Chinese name. The original name he came up with was based on the baby being born after Jan31 or the “Horse” year on the Chinese zodiac calendar. My dad proceeds to hide away in a room during the Chinese New Years festivities at home to scramble for a new name.

On a pain scale of 1-10, Viv is at a 2. The nurse is really surprised as most delivering moms would be in much more pain at this point.

The delivery room we transfer into is the size of a small studio apartment. The hospital was renovated just a few years back, so everything is still relatively new. It’s pretty luxurious for a hospital room.

Delivery occurs when the mommy-to-be reaches 10cm dilation. We wait another hour and Viv is still at 4.5cm. Dr. H calls in and recommends to break Viv’s water and induce labor to get things moving along. We really don’t want to induce labor since the baby is already early. Since it’s already late into the night, we also figure it would be better to deliver after midnight so we can get another night in the hospital to recover. The nurse mentions that Dr. H always wants to push labor along and agrees to stall and ignore his calls as long as she can. Viv is connected to an IV and we wait.

An hour or so later, Viv gets measured at 6cm dilation. She’s starting to feel more pain and asks to get the epidural. The only problem is that getting the epidural typically pushes the contractions further apart. Once you get the epidural, you can’t get out of bed and you’re committed to delivering in the next few hours, so there’s a higher chance you’ll need to induce labor.

The nurse recommends we walk around some more, but Viv’s really starting to feel contraction pains. Viv is not happy about the suggestion, but musters up some strength and we take a short stroll in the hallways before heading back.

The pain is getting intense for Viv and we request the epidural.  The anesthesiologist, a scrawny, soft-spoken Asian man in his late 40’s, comes and preps Viv. Viv curves her back like an angry cat and I stand in front of her, holding her hand. Viv gets a small injection to numb an area in her back. Shortly after, the thin, long epidural needle is prepared and inserted into Viv’s back. The catheter goes in, Viv lets out a shriek, and squeezes my hand like she’s juicing a lemon. I’m glad I took my ring off. In a calm voice, the anesthesiologist mentions,”I’m hitting a lot of bone”. He pulls out and tries again. Viv grits her teeth and asks,”Is it normal to hurt so much? it really hurts!”. The anesthesiologist responds in a calm voice,”I’m hitting a lot of bone here”. This doesn’t seem normal. Viv shrieks again as electric sparks shoot down her body. He says,”Let’s do this again”. Viv pleads,”Can we not do it again? Can we just leave it?” He responds,”No, it’s better we do it again. You’re not supposed to be in this much pain and I might be brushing against some nerves.” He inserts the needle and catheter again and, luckily, this time he gets it right the third time around.

Now we wait for the epidural to kick in and for Viv’s lower body to go numb. The nurse comes back after twenty minutes or so and starts poking Viv’s lower body to see if she feels any sensation. Everything is dull. The nurse mentions she’ll be back to see how the dilation progresses in an hour or so. Exhausted by this point, I set up my sofa bed and we both allow ourselves to fall into slumber.

We wait a few hours without any progress in dilation, so the nurse decides to start inducing labor with some Pitocin. The nurse takes a break and comes back within an hour to find that Viv’s already at 9cm dilation. It’s time to deliver! They call Dr. H and start prepping for delivery.

They roll out a metallic silver cart and the nurse neatly arranges gauze pads of varying sizes, a wide array of surgical scissors, clamps, disinfectant, a suction bulb, and two small buckets. They turn on spotlights mounted in the ceiling and positioned to aim directly at the delivery bed.

Dr. H arrives and after a short greeting, he asks me to put on some scrubs and gloves. I’m positioned on one side of the foot of the bed while the doctor positions himself on the other. Viv puts one leg on each of our thighs.

We watch the contractions come and go on the monitor. It’s like catching a wave while surfing, you need to wait for the big ones and start paddling like hell when it comes. Watching the monitor, we see the amplitude of the wave start to increase and know a big one is coming. Dr. H tells Viv,”Get ready. Now push, push, push, push push…”. Viv’s face is flush red like a ripe roma tomato. “Deep breath… push, push, push, push… one more deep breath… push, push, push, push. now relax”. We wait for the next wave to come. It’s a small one, so we skip it. Here’s a big one. “Get ready. Push, push, push, push, push”. Viv pushes like a champ. I start to see a small cloudy white bulb appear. “Is that the baby’s head?”, I ask. “No, it’s the water bag”, responds Dr. H. It’s cushioning the baby through the birth canal. Here comes another big one. “Push, push, push, push, push..” The bag gets bigger, but at the end of each push cycle, the bag recedes slightly. A few contractions later, the water bag is pushed out and pop! The water from the bag flushes out onto the delivery bed. On the next push, I start seeing hair… hair that’s caked in a gooey mess. It looks like hair that’s been stuck in the shower drain for a few weeks. “He has a full head of hair”, the doctor comments. “Push, push, push, push push!” Viv’s face gets so red with each push that it almost looks purple. The hairy head gets larger. The doctor says,”Two or three more contractions and the baby should be out.” On the next big contraction, Viv pushes and the head popped out. The doctor reaches in the birth canal and twists the baby’s body to position the shoulders to slip out. “Put your hand underneath and support the head and the get your other hand ready to catch the butt”, Dr. H instructs me. I put my left hand under our baby’s head. “Now Push! Push! Push!” Our baby slides out and I position my right hand right below our baby’s butt. Uh, what do I do now? Oh my god, he’s slippery… and heavy. Don’t drop the baby. Whatever you do, don’t drop the baby. Dr. H tells me to place the baby on Viv’s stomach. He sees me struggle to keep the baby balanced and helps guide my hands just as the baby starts to slide off my hands right onto mommy’s belly.

Our baby’s body is completely blue and it occurs to me that I haven’t heard him cry. My mind goes crazy for a split second and that’s about how long it takes for the nurse to take the bulb pump and vacuum the fluid from our baby’s mouth and nose. A second later, he’s crying and his body starts to transition from blue to red.

We had asked Dr. H to postpone clamping the umbilical cord as long as he felt was safe to feed as much cord blood into our baby. He didn’t waste much time to place two clamps on the cord. He presents me with a surgical scissor and asks me to cut it between the clamps. With one snip through the rubbery textured cord, our baby is detached.

This is our baby boy that has been growing inside Viv for the last 37 weeks! This is so surreal. Viv did such an amazing job pushing. Looking at the clock, I see it only took about 35 minutes of pushing. Even Dr. H is impressed and tells Viv,”You are a very good pusher. Congratulations, you guys both did a great job.” I thank Dr. H for letting me be a part of this amazing experience. It’s something I will never forget.

From this day forward, life will never be the same… in a good way.